Do Our Children Need Protecting? Essay

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Do our Children need Protecting?
If we try to protect our children from the world, then they will never be able to be part of the world. We cannot expect our children to be able to learn from our violent mistakes if we shelter them from the mistakes of the world. In a poem written by Billy Collins he discusses this subject. Are our children too innocent to know about the world? He uses ironic humor and satire to discuss a very controversial topic. Should we shelter our children from the world? At what cost should we protect their innocence? Collins uses his poem “The History Teacher” to show us a world where we lie to our children to protect their childlike nature. In this poem a history teacher lies to his students about historical events and trivializes these events so as not to expose the children to anything that may be bad or could corrupt there innocence. By teaching the children a fairy-tale version of history rather than the reality of it, the children fail to learn about the consequences of their actions. In doing this the teacher is promoting his students ignorance and not allowing them to learn from past mistakes; mistakes that changed the face of our history and how we view the world forever. Collins is giving us a firsthand look at how our morals can affect us, but not always in a good way.
In Collins poem he shows us how flawed the teacher’s approach to educating his students is. He shows us how the lies the teacher is telling the children are doing them more harm than good. His lies are actually making his students more ignorant about the real world than they were to begin with. Children that are ignorant to the world and the violence that is in it will never be able to be functioning members of society. In his poem Collins tries to help us understand what would happen if we removed all violence from our children’s lives. He does this by showing us with ironic humor, how much harm the teacher really is doing to the children by...